Not gonna say they're in the same league, but I quite enjoyed Possessor, Annihilation and Arrival.

But I agree it's hard to beat "the originals". I've come to the conclusion that it's probably just as much me that has changed.

I will second Annihilation, I think it's incredible.

Does it have to look dystopian to count? I enjoyed "Her" and thought it was bold and original, in a different way.

I thought that Her was great. Still sticks with me.

Sunshine (2007), District 9 (2009), Firefly (TV 2002), Serenity (2005), Battlestar Galactica (TV 2003), Lexx (TV 1997), The Expanse (TV 2015)

I would argue that we have much more original content today than ever before and so it's far more difficult to actually make anything truly groundbreaking. The narrative landscape today is far more complex, diverse, and refined than from even the early 2000s, let alone anything prior.

Ex Machina is absolutely up there IMO.

Bladerunner 2049. :-)

Yes that one. Thanks!

Everything Everywhere All At Once

Black Mirror. For broad definition of sci-fi and broad definition of film.

Maybe Dune, but, Dune is an unfinished sentence.

> Maybe Dune

I don't think Dune, the 2022 version will make it to the heights Blade Runner is at.

There are some scenes that give you Blade Runner level shivers (e.g. the Sardaukar assembly on Salusa Secundus), but they're few and far between.

And if you meant the original Dune ... nah, it certainly hasn't aged as well as BR.

I mean the 2022 one. The 1984 one has not aged well. I'm quite the fan of the 2000 tv mini-series one though.

Maybe it will rise to the levels of great sci-fi, maybe it will not, I won't judge it till I can see the complete picture. It has the correct aesthetic and the truly shiver-worthy moments are yet to come.

I'd say the exact opposite. The 2022 version - it's nice; I could fault it here or there, but it has a lot of going for it. But... it only goes so far. It doesn't reach the dramatic heights of Lynch's creation, and the mystique of the design.

(Of course one should try and watch one of the longer cuts with more of the dialog and establishing scenes.)

IMO the 2000 mini-series had great acting and actually followed the books (a rarity in today's book to TV conversions) but the low budget really killed it. Many of the desert shots were painful to watch and the sets had a very cheap vibe to them.

The desert shots were shot with a technique called translights.

You're right that they couldn't afford to shoot on-location for the desert scenes so instead they painted desert landscapes and scaled them up then printed them on 40-foot-high by 200-foot-wide transparencies and put bright lights behind them to illuminate the scenes.

They don't look anything like real life but they weren't really trying for realism as much as they were trying for artistry.

I think that when you view things through that lens, what they did craft was beautiful.